As is generally known, heat sinking apparatus aid in the cooling of power devices. Such power devices, if not heat sinked, would over heat, damaging the device. As is also known, there are a variety of heat sinking apparatus such as cast heat sinks, heat sink extrusions, and milled heat sinking structures.
Each of the heat sinks offers certain advantages and disadvantages. For example, cast heat sinks are customized to accommodate detailing for unique component layouts and RF shielding, thus providing a designer with a great degree of design flexibility. However, cast heat sinks have limited use due to a height-to-width ratio for the fins of approximately 4. In addition, cast heat sinks are limited by their relatively large weight and low heat dissipation ability. Extruded heat sinks offer better heat dissipation than cast heat sinks, but are constrained by the fixed nature of their structure. Due to this fixed structure, the addition of layout detailing and RF shielding structures to an extruded heat sink is often difficult, reducing their design flexibility. Milled heat sinks typically comprise a milled aluminum block with separately affixed fins. By attaching the fins separately, the milled heat sink's heat dissipation is better than that of a cast heat sink due to an improved height-to-width ratio of the fins. However, the cost of milling the fin slots and the component layout details into the heat sink are prohibitive. Also, the RF shielding added to milled and extruded heat sinks is less effective than that designed into cast heat sinks. Therefore, a need exists for a heat sink method and apparatus which combines the advantages of cast, extruded and milled heat sinks, without many of their disadvantages.